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Ege Özsoy

Publications and source records attributed to Ege Özsoy.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Prototype-Based Knowledge Guidance for Fine-Grained Structured Radiology Reporting

Structured radiology reporting promises faster, more consistent communication than free text, but automation remains difficult as models must make many fine-grained, discrete decisions about rare findings and attributes from limited structured supervision. In contrast, free-text reports are produced at scale in routine care and implicitly encode fine-grained, image-linked information through detailed descriptions. To leverage this unstructured knowledge, we propose ProtoSR, an approach for injecting free-text information into structured report population. First, we introduce an automatic extraction pipeline that uses an instruction-tuned LLM to mine 80k+ MIMIC-CXR studies and build a multimodal knowledge base aligned with a structured reporting template, representing each answer option with a visual prototype. Using this knowledge base, ProtoSR is trained to retrieve prototypes relevant for the current image-question pair and augment the model predictions through a prototype-conditioned residual, providing a data-driven second opinion that selectively corrects predictions. On the Rad-ReStruct benchmark, ProtoSR achieves state-of-the-art results, with the largest improvements on detailed attribute questions, demonstrating the value of integrating free-text derived signal for fine-grained image understanding.

cs.AI↗

MintAct: A Unified Visual Agent for Digital Environments

We present MintAct, a family of vision-language models that unifies UI grounding, multi-step navigation across mobile, desktop, and web, and visual tool use, trained at 2B, 4B, and 8B scales. Through careful design of our environments, data, and training recipes, MintAct models match the performance of per-domain specialists across all of these capabilities. To enable this, we develop a scalable environment and reinforcement learning (RL) infrastructure. On the environment side, we host hundreds of concurrent instances across heterogeneous per-domain backends, serving both trajectory data collection and online RL. To enable efficient and scalable RL training, an asynchronous framework keeps explicit control over the cross-domain training distribution and remains stable under noisy environment feedback and off-policy drift. Experimental results show that MintAct achieves state-of-the-art performance (48.9 on OSWorld-Verified) across a wide range of benchmarks at comparable model sizes.

cs.CV↗

EHR2Path: Comprehensive Pathway-Level Modeling of Longitudinal Patient Trajectories from Multimodal Electronic Health Records

Forecasting how a patient's condition is likely to evolve, including possible deterioration, recovery, treatment needs, and care transitions, could support more proactive and personalized care, but requires modeling heterogeneous and longitudinal electronic health record (EHR) data. Yet, existing approaches typically focus on isolated prediction tasks, narrow feature spaces, or short context windows, limiting their ability to model full patient pathways. To address this gap, we introduce EHR2Path, a multimodal framework for forecasting and simulating full in-hospital patient pathways from routine EHRs. EHR2Path converts diverse clinical inputs into a unified temporal representation, enabling modeling of a substantially broader set of patient information, including radiology reports, physician notes, vital signs, medication and laboratory patterns, and dense bedside charting. To support long clinical histories and broad feature spaces, we introduce a Masked Summarization Bottleneck that compresses long-term history into compact, task-optimized summary tokens while preserving recent context, improving both performance and token efficiency. In retrospective experiments on MIMIC-IV, EHR2Path enables next-step pathway forecasting and iterative simulation of complete in-hospital trajectories, while outperforming strong baselines on directly comparable tasks. These results demonstrate the feasibility of pathway-level modeling from routine EHRs, and indicate potential for supporting anticipatory clinical decision-making. Our code is available at https://github.com/ChantalMP/EHR2Path.

cs.LG↗

OR-Action: Multi-Role Video Understanding with Fine-Grained Actions

Fine-grained understanding of operating room (OR) activity could enable workflow-aware assistance, yet remains difficult due to clutter, occlusions, and limited sensing. The prevailing approach to model this environment is scene graphs as an interpretable representation of OR interactions. Converting their frame-wise relational predictions into temporally extended, fine-grained actions however, is challenging without explicit temporal modeling. To enable a principled temporal evaluation of current OR understanding methods, we introduce the first action-centric benchmark built on a publicly available ego-exocentric OR dataset by defining a fine-grained, multi-role action taxonomy and generating dense action segments via distillation from ground-truth scene graph state changes. Experiments on this benchmark show that current scene graph prediction methods struggle to model temporal structure, even when adding explicit modeling through Graph Neural Networks. We therefore introduce a vision-only temporal model that outperforms graph-based methods significantly when using all available egocentric video as input. Building on this model we also introduce a novel multi- to single-view feature alignment strategy that improves single-view performance on multi-role action recognition, mitigating the need for extensive egocentric video capture. Benchmark and code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

PanORama: Multiview Consistent Panoptic Segmentation in Operating Rooms

Operating rooms (ORs) are cluttered, dynamic, highly occluded environments, where reliable spatial understanding is essential for situational awareness during complex surgical workflows. Achieving spatial understanding for panoptic segmentation from sparse multiview images poses a fundamental challenge, as limited visibility in a subset of views often leads to mispredictions across cameras. To this end, we introduce PanORama, the first panoptic segmentation for the operating room that is multiview-consistent by design. By modeling cross-view interactions at the feature level inside the backbone in a single forward pass, view consistency emerges directly rather than through post-hoc refinement. We evaluate on the MM-OR and 4D-OR datasets, achieving >70% Panoptic Quality (PQ) performance, and outperforming the previous state of the art. Importantly, PanORama is calibration-free, requiring no camera parameters, and generalizes to unseen camera viewpoints within any multiview configuration at inference time. By substantially enhancing multiview segmentation and, consequently, spatial understanding in the OR, we believe our approach opens new opportunities for surgical perception and assistance. Code will be released upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

Rewarding Doubt: A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Calibrated Confidence Expression of Large Language Models

A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated confidence estimates alongside their answers to factual questions. Our method optimizes a reward based on the logarithmic scoring rule, explicitly penalizing both over- and under-confidence. This encourages the model to align its confidence estimates with the actual predictive accuracy. The optimal policy under our reward design would result in perfectly calibrated confidence expressions. Unlike prior approaches that decouple confidence estimation from response generation, our method integrates confidence calibration seamlessly into the generative process of the LLM. Empirically, we demonstrate that models trained with our approach exhibit substantially improved calibration and generalize to unseen tasks without further fine-tuning, suggesting the emergence of general confidence awareness.

cs.CL↗

Language Agents for Hypothesis-driven Clinical Decision Making with Reinforcement Learning

Clinical decision-making is a dynamic, interactive, and cyclic process where doctors have to repeatedly decide on which clinical action to perform and consider newly uncovered information for diagnosis and treatment. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to support clinicians in this process, however, most applications of LLMs in clinical decision support suffer from one of two limitations: Either they assume the unrealistic scenario of immediate availability of all patient information and do not model the interactive and iterative investigation process, or they restrict themselves to the limited "out-of-the-box" capabilities of large pre-trained models without performing task-specific training. In contrast to this, we propose to model clinical decision-making for diagnosis with a hypothesis-driven uncertainty-aware language agent, LA-CDM, that converges towards a diagnosis via repeatedly requesting and interpreting relevant tests. Using a hybrid training paradigm combining supervised and reinforcement learning, we train LA-CDM with three objectives targeting critical aspects of clinical decision-making: accurate hypothesis generation, hypothesis uncertainty estimation, and efficient decision-making. We evaluate our methodology on MIMIC-CDM, a real-world dataset covering four abdominal diseases containing various clinical tests and show the benefit of explicitly training clinical decision-making for increasing diagnostic performance and efficiency.

cs.CL↗

Recognizing Surgical Phases Anywhere: Few-Shot Test-time Adaptation and Task-graph Guided Refinement

The complexity and diversity of surgical workflows, driven by heterogeneous operating room settings, institutional protocols, and anatomical variability, present a significant challenge in developing generalizable models for cross-institutional and cross-procedural surgical understanding. While recent surgical foundation models pretrained on large-scale vision-language data offer promising transferability, their zero-shot performance remains constrained by domain shifts, limiting their utility in unseen surgical environments. To address this, we introduce Surgical Phase Anywhere (SPA), a lightweight framework for versatile surgical workflow understanding that adapts foundation models to institutional settings with minimal annotation. SPA leverages few-shot spatial adaptation to align multi-modal embeddings with institution-specific surgical scenes and phases. It also ensures temporal consistency through diffusion modeling, which encodes task-graph priors derived from institutional procedure protocols. Finally, SPA employs dynamic test-time adaptation, exploiting the mutual agreement between multi-modal phase prediction streams to adapt the model to a given test video in a self-supervised manner, enhancing the reliability under test-time distribution shifts. SPA is a lightweight adaptation framework, allowing hospitals to rapidly customize phase recognition models by defining phases in natural language text, annotating a few images with the phase labels, and providing a task graph defining phase transitions. The experimental results show that the SPA framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in few-shot surgical phase recognition across multiple institutions and procedures, even outperforming full-shot models with 32-shot labeled data. Code is available at https://github.com/CAMMA-public/SPA

cs.CV↗

Specialized Foundation Models for Intelligent Operating Rooms

Surgical procedures unfold in complex environments demanding coordination between surgical teams, tools, imaging and increasingly, intelligent robotic systems. Ensuring safety and efficiency in ORs of the future requires intelligent systems, like surgical robots, smart instruments and digital copilots, capable of understanding complex activities and hazards of surgeries. Yet, existing computational approaches, lack the breadth, and generalization needed for comprehensive OR understanding. We introduce ORQA, a multimodal foundation model unifying visual, auditory, and structured data for holistic surgical understanding. ORQA's question-answering framework empowers diverse tasks, serving as an intelligence core for a broad spectrum of surgical technologies. We benchmark ORQA against generalist vision-language models, including ChatGPT and Gemini, and show that while they struggle to perceive surgical scenes, ORQA delivers substantially stronger, consistent performance. Recognizing the extensive range of deployment settings across clinical practice, we design, and release a family of smaller ORQA models tailored to different computational requirements. This work establishes a foundation for the next wave of intelligent surgical solutions, enabling surgical teams and medical technology providers to create smarter and safer operating rooms.

cs.CV↗

PhenoKG: Knowledge Graph-Driven Gene Discovery and Patient Insights from Phenotypes Alone

Identifying causative genes from patient phenotypes remains a significant challenge in precision medicine, with important implications for the diagnosis and treatment of genetic disorders. We propose a novel graph-based approach for predicting causative genes from patient phenotypes, with or without an available list of candidate genes, by integrating a rare disease knowledge graph (KG). Our model, combining graph neural networks and transformers, achieves substantial improvements over the current state-of-the-art. On the real-world MyGene2 dataset, it attains a mean reciprocal rank (MRR) of 24.64\% and nDCG@100 of 33.64\%, surpassing the best baseline (SHEPHERD) at 19.02\% MRR and 30.54\% nDCG@100. We perform extensive ablation studies to validate the contribution of each model component. Notably, the approach generalizes to cases where only phenotypic data are available, addressing key challenges in clinical decision support when genomic information is incomplete.

cs.LG↗

EgoExOR: An Ego-Exo-Centric Operating Room Dataset for Surgical Activity Understanding

Operating rooms (ORs) demand precise coordination among surgeons, nurses, and equipment in a fast-paced, occlusion-heavy environment, necessitating advanced perception models to enhance safety and efficiency. Existing datasets either provide partial egocentric views or sparse exocentric multi-view context, but do not explore the comprehensive combination of both. We introduce EgoExOR, the first OR dataset and accompanying benchmark to fuse first-person and third-person perspectives. Spanning 94 minutes (84,553 frames at 15 FPS) of two emulated spine procedures, Ultrasound-Guided Needle Insertion and Minimally Invasive Spine Surgery, EgoExOR integrates egocentric data (RGB, gaze, hand tracking, audio) from wearable glasses, exocentric RGB and depth from RGB-D cameras, and ultrasound imagery. Its detailed scene graph annotations, covering 36 entities and 22 relations (568,235 triplets), enable robust modeling of clinical interactions, supporting tasks like action recognition and human-centric perception. We evaluate the surgical scene graph generation performance of two adapted state-of-the-art models and offer a new baseline that explicitly leverages EgoExOR's multimodal and multi-perspective signals. This new dataset and benchmark set a new foundation for OR perception, offering a rich, multimodal resource for next-generation clinical perception.

cs.CV↗

RaDialog: A Large Vision-Language Model for Radiology Report Generation and Conversational Assistance

Conversational AI tools that can generate and discuss clinically correct radiology reports for a given medical image have the potential to transform radiology. Such a human-in-the-loop radiology assistant could facilitate a collaborative diagnostic process, thus saving time and improving the quality of reports. Towards this goal, we introduce RaDialog, the first thoroughly evaluated and publicly available large vision-language model for radiology report generation and interactive dialog. RaDialog effectively integrates visual image features and structured pathology findings with a large language model (LLM) while simultaneously adapting it to a specialized domain using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. To keep the conversational abilities of the underlying LLM, we propose a comprehensive, semi-automatically labeled, image-grounded instruct dataset for chest X-ray radiology tasks. By training with this dataset, our method achieves state-of-the-art clinical correctness in report generation and shows impressive abilities in interactive tasks such as correcting reports and answering questions, serving as a foundational step toward clinical dialog systems. Our code is available on github: https://github.com/ChantalMP/RaDialog.

cs.CV↗

MM-OR: A Large Multimodal Operating Room Dataset for Semantic Understanding of High-Intensity Surgical Environments

Operating rooms (ORs) are complex, high-stakes environments requiring precise understanding of interactions among medical staff, tools, and equipment for enhancing surgical assistance, situational awareness, and patient safety. Current datasets fall short in scale, realism and do not capture the multimodal nature of OR scenes, limiting progress in OR modeling. To this end, we introduce MM-OR, a realistic and large-scale multimodal spatiotemporal OR dataset, and the first dataset to enable multimodal scene graph generation. MM-OR captures comprehensive OR scenes containing RGB-D data, detail views, audio, speech transcripts, robotic logs, and tracking data and is annotated with panoptic segmentations, semantic scene graphs, and downstream task labels. Further, we propose MM2SG, the first multimodal large vision-language model for scene graph generation, and through extensive experiments, demonstrate its ability to effectively leverage multimodal inputs. Together, MM-OR and MM2SG establish a new benchmark for holistic OR understanding, and open the path towards multimodal scene analysis in complex, high-stakes environments. Our code, and data is available at https://github.com/egeozsoy/MM-OR.

cs.CV↗

Location-Free Scene Graph Generation

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) is a visual understanding task, aiming to describe a scene as a graph of entities and their relationships with each other. Existing works rely on location labels in form of bounding boxes or segmentation masks, increasing annotation costs and limiting dataset expansion. Recognizing that many applications do not require location data, we break this dependency and introduce location-free scene graph generation (LF-SGG). This new task aims at predicting instances of entities, as well as their relationships, without the explicit calculation of their spatial localization. To objectively evaluate the task, the predicted and ground truth scene graphs need to be compared. We solve this NP-hard problem through an efficient branching algorithm. Additionally, we design the first LF-SGG method, Pix2SG, using autoregressive sequence modeling. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on three scene graph generation datasets as well as two downstream tasks, image retrieval and visual question answering, and show that our approach is competitive to existing methods while not relying on location cues.

cs.CV↗

ORacle: Large Vision-Language Models for Knowledge-Guided Holistic OR Domain Modeling

Every day, countless surgeries are performed worldwide, each within the distinct settings of operating rooms (ORs) that vary not only in their setups but also in the personnel, tools, and equipment used. This inherent diversity poses a substantial challenge for achieving a holistic understanding of the OR, as it requires models to generalize beyond their initial training datasets. To reduce this gap, we introduce ORacle, an advanced vision-language model designed for holistic OR domain modeling, which incorporates multi-view and temporal capabilities and can leverage external knowledge during inference, enabling it to adapt to previously unseen surgical scenarios. This capability is further enhanced by our novel data augmentation framework, which significantly diversifies the training dataset, ensuring ORacle's proficiency in applying the provided knowledge effectively. In rigorous testing, in scene graph generation, and downstream tasks on the 4D-OR dataset, ORacle not only demonstrates state-of-the-art performance but does so requiring less data than existing models. Furthermore, its adaptability is displayed through its ability to interpret unseen views, actions, and appearances of tools and equipment. This demonstrates ORacle's potential to significantly enhance the scalability and affordability of OR domain modeling and opens a pathway for future advancements in surgical data science. We will release our code and data upon acceptance.

cs.CV↗

Dynamic Scene Graph Representation for Surgical Video

Surgical videos captured from microscopic or endoscopic imaging devices are rich but complex sources of information, depicting different tools and anatomical structures utilized during an extended amount of time. Despite containing crucial workflow information and being commonly recorded in many procedures, usage of surgical videos for automated surgical workflow understanding is still limited. In this work, we exploit scene graphs as a more holistic, semantically meaningful and human-readable way to represent surgical videos while encoding all anatomical structures, tools, and their interactions. To properly evaluate the impact of our solutions, we create a scene graph dataset from semantic segmentations from the CaDIS and CATARACTS datasets. We demonstrate that scene graphs can be leveraged through the use of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to tackle surgical downstream tasks such as surgical workflow recognition with competitive performance. Moreover, we demonstrate the benefits of surgical scene graphs regarding the explainability and robustness of model decisions, which are crucial in the clinical setting.

cs.CV↗

Rad-ReStruct: A Novel VQA Benchmark and Method for Structured Radiology Reporting

Radiology reporting is a crucial part of the communication between radiologists and other medical professionals, but it can be time-consuming and error-prone. One approach to alleviate this is structured reporting, which saves time and enables a more accurate evaluation than free-text reports. However, there is limited research on automating structured reporting, and no public benchmark is available for evaluating and comparing different methods. To close this gap, we introduce Rad-ReStruct, a new benchmark dataset that provides fine-grained, hierarchically ordered annotations in the form of structured reports for X-Ray images. We model the structured reporting task as hierarchical visual question answering (VQA) and propose hi-VQA, a novel method that considers prior context in the form of previously asked questions and answers for populating a structured radiology report. Our experiments show that hi-VQA achieves competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on the medical VQA benchmark VQARad while performing best among methods without domain-specific vision-language pretraining and provides a strong baseline on Rad-ReStruct. Our work represents a significant step towards the automated population of structured radiology reports and provides a valuable first benchmark for future research in this area. Our dataset and code is available at https://github.com/ChantalMP/Rad-ReStruct.

cs.CV↗

CholecTriplet2022: Show me a tool and tell me the triplet -- an endoscopic vision challenge for surgical action triplet detection

Formalizing surgical activities as triplets of the used instruments, actions performed, and target anatomies is becoming a gold standard approach for surgical activity modeling. The benefit is that this formalization helps to obtain a more detailed understanding of tool-tissue interaction which can be used to develop better Artificial Intelligence assistance for image-guided surgery. Earlier efforts and the CholecTriplet challenge introduced in 2021 have put together techniques aimed at recognizing these triplets from surgical footage. Estimating also the spatial locations of the triplets would offer a more precise intraoperative context-aware decision support for computer-assisted intervention. This paper presents the CholecTriplet2022 challenge, which extends surgical action triplet modeling from recognition to detection. It includes weakly-supervised bounding box localization of every visible surgical instrument (or tool), as the key actors, and the modeling of each tool-activity in the form of triplet. The paper describes a baseline method and 10 new deep learning algorithms presented at the challenge to solve the task. It also provides thorough methodological comparisons of the methods, an in-depth analysis of the obtained results across multiple metrics, visual and procedural challenges; their significance, and useful insights for future research directions and applications in surgery.

eess.IV↗